Telltale Signs

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

We are now in the homestretch of a marathon election campaign where the runners have to sprint to the finish line, where it now goes quickly from ugly to really ugly. It’s kitchen sink time when candidates behind in the count start throwing everything at the frontrunner. In the case of Manny Villar, who has invested billions of pesos of his personal fortune into his presidential campaign, this means throwing the previously discredited hoax of a psych report back at Noynoy Aquino with full force one final time.

Three weeks ago, according to former CNN correspondent now Managing Director of ABS-CBN News Maria Ressa, unidentified individuals in Villar's Nacionalista Party released a psych report about Noynoy Aquino that supposedly came from Ateneo’s Psychology Department that was allegedly signed by Fr. Carmelo Caluag.

After Villar supporters spread the derogatory report virally throughout the Internet and to the mainstream media, it was exposed as a hoax by Fr. Caluag who was the principal of the Ateneo High School at the time the report was done and who had no connection with Ateneo’s Psychology Department.

While conceding that the psych report was a hoax though not admitting that he had anything to do with it, Villar nonetheless demanded that Noynoy submit to psychological testing to prove that he is fit to be president. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA), through a Malacanang spokesman, echoed Villar’s call and asked the public to consider the “brain health” of the candidates before making their choice.

Undeterred by the backfire this desperate "Hail Mary" approach has unleashed, the Nacionalista Party this week, through spokesman Guido Delgado, released a second psych report again alleging that Noynoy suffered from depression and melancholia when he was a 19-year old college student. This time the report was allegedly signed by Fr. Jaime Bulatao of the Ateneo Psychology Department. The only problem with the report is that, like the first one, it is also bogus as Fr. Bulatao himself confirmed.

Since citing the names of actual people can be dangerous as the claims can be easily repudiated, the Villar supporters now attribute their Noynoy psych reports to anonymous sources. First there was “Tomcat”, a supposed Ateneo classmate of Noynoy, who described Noynoy’s erratic behavior in grade school. The latest salvo comes from my friend, Mila Aguilar, a supporter of Brother Ed Villanueva, who sent out to her yahoogroups the April 24, 2010 "Clincher" hit piece of Philippine Star columnist Carmen "Chit" Pedrosa who cited as her source a friend who is “a private person who received information she feels must be told. She is connecting a story many years ago when Noynoy was a young boy in Boston.” In law, this would be called quadruple hearsay.

Though Mila sent out Chit’s column to everyone on her email list, she included a warning to readers that Carmen Pedrosa and another columnist, Belinda Cunanan, “are tainted sources since we all know whom they are for.” Chit has been an outspoken advocate for Charter Change and a supporter of the president who backs it.

The strange coincidence is that Chit’s column appeared in the same week she unexpectedly dropped by my office in San Francisco for a friendly chat. Chit is an old friend whom I had not seen since late 1970 when she wrote “The Untold Story of Imelda Romualdez Marcos”. She and her late husband, Albert, had to flee to London when Marcos declared martial law in 1972.

In our candid conversation, I expressed my disappointment at the vitriolic attacks she had been leveling against Noynoy Aquino. I asked her why she was so merciless. Chit explained that she believes Noynoy is America’s candidate and, as she stated in a previous column, “we have to assert our sovereignty and independence against those who think they can manipulate our politics, to suit their own agenda”.

I told her that I thought that view was “soo 1970”. The world has changed considerably since then. The Cold War is over and the Philippines is not as important to the US now as it was during the Vietnam War when the US had military bases in the Philippines. Just because the majority of Filipinos in the US support Noynoy’s candidacy doesn’t mean the US supports Noynoy. I wish it did.

When Chit asked me what I have against Pres. Arroyo, I said "Ampatuan". I explained that I wasn't just referring to the November 24, 2009 brutal massacre of 58 journalists and members of the family of Andal Ampatuan's political rival by the Ampatuans but also to the whole corrupt political system where GMA coddles and through prok barrel funds financially supports warlords like the Ampatuans all over the Philippines as long as they deliver the votes to her.

GMA is so beholden to the Ampatuans that if they asked her to dismiss the murder charges against two Ampatuan uncles, she would do so. Ampatuan Jr. is so beholden to GMA that if she asked him to wear a yellow shirt and flash an "L" sign at a press conference in his jail cell, he would do it for her even though he had personally expressed his support for Manny Villar. Of course the acts are not inconsistent.

I could have gone on and on but Chit had to go so we promised to see each other again after the elections.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

The blogosphere has been inundated with projections about the probable outcome of the May 10 elections in the Philippines with many bloggers predicting an outright Noynoy Aquino victory based on the strength of polls that show him consistently holding on to 37% or more of the vote.

Still others contend that Manny Villar will eke out a win despite falling in the polls from 35% to 22%, just slightly ahead of Erap Estrada at 20%, because of “logistics”.

As Villar Los Angeles supporter Bobby Reyes candidly wrote in his Mabuhay Radio blog, “in the Philippines, the Golden Rule applies: "The political party that has the gold (money, bread, dinero, pera), rules… only the Nacionalista Party has more-than ample resources that can translate into votes during the Election Day. And …while money cannot buy you love, it can help a lot in rallying the troops during the last hours before Election Day. I am not saying for the record that money can buy votes (which is supposedly illegal) but let us be pragmatic about the whole electoral process in the Philippines.”

An increasing number of bloggers and prognosticators believe, however, that there will likely be a failure of elections. As Jason Gutierrez noted, “electricity supply problems, data transmission complications, the reliability of the machines themselves and the potential for the system to be manipulated could lead to a failure of elections”.

But it will largely be a failure of “national” elections as local elections for House seats will likely succeed. Under this scenario, Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will handily win her House seat in Pampanga and then be elected Speaker of the House.

Because senators are elected nationally, the failure of elections will mean that they will not be able to convene after June 30 to elect a senate president who will rule in the absence of a duly elected president and vice-president. Without a Senate President, the next in line would be the House Speaker. (June 30 News Flash: “Incoming House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo today assumed the presidency from outgoing termed-out President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo”)

But a failure of elections can also pave the way for an “interim revolutionary government”, an idea that was publicly floated in late 2009 by then Presidential National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales. Instead of being reprimanded by Pres. Arroyo for making this suggestion, he was instead rewarded with his appointment as Secretary of National Defense to succeed Arroyo’s presidential candidate, Gilberto Teodoro.

In Gerry Cunanan’s widely-circulated blog (“A Worst Case Scenario”), he described a visit last November 2009 by Secretary Gonzales and his political adviser, Fr. Archie Intengan, with Novaliches Bishop Antonio Tobias “to convince the good bishop to support them in their plan to install an interim Revolutionary Government. What gave them the idea that Bishop Tobias would cooperate was a supposed letter from the activist bishop addressed to the CBCP (Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines)--which they claim to have been able to obtain--saying that he does not believe that the 2010 elections would do us any good and what we need is an interim revolutionary government to reform the political system.”

Sec. Gonzales is the national chairman of the Partido Demokratikong Sosyalista ng Pilipinas which was founded in 1973. According to its website (www.pdsp.net), it is “the only member of the Left (a long-time member of the Socialist International) that does not trace its roots to the Communist Party of the Philippines or to the ideology of Jose Ma. Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)”.

Gonzales’ PDSP has been engaged in a hot war with Jose Ma. Sison’s CPP which supports Villar because he accdepted two members of the Makabayan slate on his senate ticket. Gonzales accused the CPP and its military arm, the New People’s Army, of assassinating PDSP secretary-general Danny Yang in July 2009. According to the PDSP website, which lists Fr. Intengan as an active member, the CPP and the NPA liquidated over a thousand people from 2000 up to May 2006, and majority of their victims were civilians. “Documents gathered from the military revealed that in a span of six years, the CPP-NPA perpetrated 1,130 liquidations, resulting in the killing of 1,227 people. The victims included 384 soldiers, policemen and intelligence operatives and 843 civilians.”

Arroyo’s appointment of Gonzales in November of 2009 drew an angry response from Lito Ustarez, a top official of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), a labor organization affiliated with the CPP: "With the appointment of the much-hated national security adviser...Gloria Arroyo has just brought Adolf Hitler back to life…He is one of the worst Filipinos for the job of a Defense secretary. We are concerned that his appointment will signal another escalation of extra-judicial killings, enforced disappearances, and all-out militarization in the country, especially in Mindanao." Ustarez charged that Gonzales was the architect of Oplan Bantay Laya 1 and 2, the counter-insurgency program linked to extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances of activists.

Cunanan’s blog posits the “hypothetical scenario”where something goes wrong after the May 10 elections and people “go out into the streets denouncing the delay or failure of the elections. Such unstable situation can grow worse after every day that would pass. If any violent incident happens--say, an explosion that would kill a number of demonstrators- -chaos may ensue. In such a situation, the President, with the support of Congress, can "legally" declare Martial Law.”

After May 10, will it be Aquino or Villar or will it be People Power 3 or Martial Law 2?

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

No one ever heard of him before and no one knows anything more about him since but the hitherto unknown Vetellano Acosta is the first name that close to 55 million Filipino voters will see on their ballots in the May 10 elections.

Prior to January 15, 2010, the Philippine Commission on Elections (Comelec) had only approved eight presidential candidates whose names would be listed alphabetically on the official ballot in groups of three with “Aquino, Benigno” topping the list on the first column and “Villar, Manny” posted at the bottom of the third column.

On January 15, 2010, however, the Comelec added two more names to the list. The first one, Nick Perlas, was not a surprise because the environmentalists’ candidate had obtained a Supreme Court order for the Comelec to place his name on the ballot. But even with the Supreme Court’s order, only 5 of the 7 Comelec commissioners voted to do so.

In contrast, all 7 commissioners voted unanimously to include Vetellano Acosta’s name on the list even if none of them had ever heard of him before he applied. In his Comelec application, Acosta listed his residence to be in the Salcedo Village commercial district of Makati but his voting precinct in Santa Ana , Manila , a clear electoral violation that the Comelec ignored.

Acosta also did not sign his Comelec application which was filed after the filing deadline had passed.

Acosta listed his job as a “financial consultant” and his party affiliation as the “KBL” which is the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan that the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos founded in 1978 and which had not fielded a presidential candidate in the two previous presidential elections.

When the Comelec announced Acosta’s surprise inclusion in the January 15, 2010 meeting, there were gasps of disbelief in the audience which included a number of would-be presidentiables whose candidacies had been rejected by the Comelec. Among them was Atty. Ely Pamatong whose previous 2003 presidential bid had also been rejected by the Comelec. After the announcement was made, Pamatong stood up and yelled “Magnanakaw!” (thieves!) at the Commissioners, accusing them of receiving 5 million pesos each to approve Acosta’s application.

The Liberal Party immediately challenged the qualifications of Acosta as LP leaders smelled a foul plot to include Acosta’s name on the ballot simply to list him at the top of the first column to dislodge Noynoy Aquino’s name from that top slot and to put Manny Villar’s name alone in a column all by himself.

Because of the LP’s protest, the Comelec commissioners conducted a hearing on January 28, 2010 to determine Acosta’s qualifications after they had already listed his name on the ballot. At the hearing, Acosta appeared “accompanied by a battery of lawyers that included former election commissioners” (Philippine Daily Inquirer). Acosta claimed to be the president of a bank in Palau which the Comelec then asked for verification. (What was he doing in the Philippines then?)

In reply to a question, Acosta said that he couldn’t recall when he joined the KBL. He said that it was “only an accident” that made him the KBL nominee. In an interview after the hearing, he said that he will no longer campaign and join presidential debates, and that he would leave his candidacy to God.

When interviewed about Acosta, former national KBL president and son of the KBL founder Rep. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. said “I don't know him. I don't even know what he looks like. It seems that his running is a big joke.” The KBL vice-presidential candidate, Jay Sonza, said he never heard of Acosta.

It turned out Acosta wasn’t even a registered voter in Manila or anywhere else and was never connected with a Palau bank or any other company. With no visible means of support, who provided Acosta with the funds to hire an impressive battery of expensive lawyers?

Though Acosta failed to provide any documentation to support his qualifications, the Comelec still waited until March 5, 2010 to officially disqualify him from the presidential race. By then, the Comelec had already printed 9 million ballots with Acosta’s name on it. Because it did not want to “waste money” by reprinting those ballots just to remove Acosta’s name, the Comelec decided to proceed with printing the rest of the 55 million ballots with Acosta’s name still on it.

These series of events raise a lot of disturbing questions:

Was Pamatong right? Did the Comelec commissioners accept 5 million pesos each to include Acosta’s name on the official ballot?

Was Bongbong right? Was Acosta’s candidacy just “a big joke”? Who was the “big joke” on?

What did Acosta mean when he said that his candidacy was just an “accident”? Was it just by “accident” of birth that his surname Acosta happened to be alphabetically ahead of Aquino?

Did a conversation occur in an alternate universe where Bongbong Marcos, upon accepting a senate slot in Manny Villar’s Nacionalista Party, suggest to Villar as a big joke fielding a KBL candidate with a name that would be listed ahead of Aquino?

Why wasn’t there anyone in the Comelec with an ounce of integrity to reject this obvious ploy against Noynoy?

How can the Comelec be trusted to conduct fair and honest elections on May 10 when it hasn’t shown any desire or willingness to do so thus far?

Thursday, January 28, 2010

When Maritess Salientes Bloom, a dual citizen from Boston, Massachusetts, appeared at a hearing before the members of the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) in Manila on January 14, 2010, she was hopeful that the commissioners would grant her petition to extend the voter registration period for overseas Filipinos.

There was, after all, no opposition to her petition and the commissioners who heard her lawyer’s arguments expressed no reservations and actually seemed sympathetic to the plight of overseas Filipinos. Loida Nicolas-Lewis, a New York resident and long-time advocate for the suffrage rights of overseas Filipinos who accompanied Maritess to the hearing, called me right after the hearing to tell me “the good news”.

“There will be an en banc hearing of all the Comelec commissioners on Tuesday, January 19, but it is all but certain that the Comelec will extend the voter registration period for overseas Filipinos,” she announced.

I was attending a meeting in South San Francisco when Loida called so I placed her on my speaker phone and all the overseas Filipinos in the room heard her announcement and her cry of “Hallelujah!” which everyone in the room joined in chorus.

It seemed too good to be true. For the last several months, I have written articles advocating for the extension of the registration period for overseas Filipinos and I had personally e-mailed each of the Comelec commissioners but all my e-mails went unheeded. Not one of them bothered to even give me the time of day.

Then on December 8, 2009, the Philippine Supreme Court (SC) unexpectedly granted the petition of Roberto Palatino to extend the registration period for Philippine voters after his petition was denied by the Comelec. After reviewing the Palatino decision, Loida and I concluded that our best hope for securing the extension of the registration period for overseas Filipinos was with the Supreme Court.

Our Philippine lawyers, headed by Atty. Jose Amor Amorado, informed us that we first had to file a petition with the Comelec, which I was virtually certain the Comelec would reject, before we could take the matter up the SC.

So our lawyers prepared the petition on behalf of Maritess Bloom, an overseas Filipino who had not been able to register before the August 31, 2009 deadline but who wanted to do so. Her petition to the Comelec was filed on January 11, 2010 and the hearing was set for three days later.

At the January 14 hearing, Atty. Amorado argued that the deadline for overseas registration should be extended by 28 days because the Comelec’s August 31, 2009 deadline was 28 days shorter than the deadline set by the Philippine Congress when it approved the Overseas Absentee Voting Act of 2003 (RA 9189).

The shortened deadline, Bloom’s petition asserted, “effectively deprived millions of the voting population twenty-eight (28) days of opportunity to register provided to them by the Overseas Absentee Voting Act of 2003, thereby actually amending the statute’s provision on the system of continuing registration of overseas absentee voters.”

The arguments seemed to hit home with the commissioners who did not question the petitioner or her lawyers.

Despite the early optimism, however, on January 19, 2010, the Comelec commissioners voted unanimously to reject Bloom’s petition by declaring that the 280 day "prohibitive period" applied only to the 2004 elections because Congress explicitly stated that "for the succeeding elections, the Commission shall provide for the period within which applications must be filed".

What the Comelec failed to comprehend is that when the Philippine Congress passed the Overseas Absentee Voting Law in 2003, it set a 280 day “prohibitive period” because Congress anticipated that it would take a longer time to get the voter registration mechanisms in place for overseas elections as it would be the first time it was being done. After the basic mechanisms were set in place, Congress believed that it would take a considerably shorter time in future elections to register overseas voters so it left it up to the Comelec to set future deadlines. Instead of the shorter period anticipated by Congress, the Comelec went in the opposite direction.

In denying Bloom's petition, the 9-page Comelec decision explained that it would take a longer time for overseas voting because "for the first time, the Commission shall be implementing the nationwide automated election system". But overseas voting will be manually tabulated and not automated so this was totally irrelevant.

To explain why it didn’t have enough time to extend the registration for overseas voters, the Comelec cited examples of what it has to do to prepare for the May 2010 elections like “project precincts”, and "Board of Election Inspectors" and listing the candidates for local elections. But all of these examples don’t apply to overseas absentee voters who can’t vote for local candidates and who don’t require “Inspectors” or “project precincts” as consular officials will supervise the voter registration and the actual voting.

In its decision, the Comelec boasted that it had “done its best in ensuring the success of the overseas absentee voting system” by taking credit for all the actions of the consular officials to register overseas Filipinos with their limited resources without any financial assistance from the Comelec.

The Comelec defensively insisted that it “did not sleep on its job” of registering overseas Filipinos but the commissioners’ loud snores belie this empty claim. They’re all still asleep.

In its conclusion, the Comelec stated its duty "to balance the interest of the electorate with the end in view of ensuring that the right of suffrage of our people is not deprived of them." This is actually the key to understanding the attitude and mentality of the Comelec commissioners towards overseas Filipinos.

By “our people”, the Comelec is really only referring to the Filipino voters in the Philippines. It is only their “right of suffrage” that the Comelec cares about, reflecting a consistently callous and total indifference to the suffrage rights of overseas Filipinos.

My niece, Pauli, was only ten years old when Gene Cajayon’s feature length film, The Debut, was shown in mainstream theatres all over the US in March of 2002. Many years later, when Pauli was in her teens, she saw the movie on DVD about the Filipino American traditional celebration of an 18-year old girl’s debut and it inspired her to celebrate her own debut just the way that her aunts recounted how they celebrated theirs in the Philippines. It’s not a distinctly Filipino tradition of course. “Debut” comes from the word “debuter” which is French for “to lead off” and can be traced back to feudal England where it was the custom of the landed gentry to present their daughters to society when they reached “marriageable age”. When the middle classes began to accumulate large sums of money after the Industrial Revolution, the English aristocrats saw the need to cement their alliances with the new emerging entrepreneurial class by sponsoring their daughters for presentation to the Court of St. James and having their aristocratic sons marry entrepreneurial daughters. The institution of the Debut eventually made its way to America in 1748 when 59 colonial Philadelphia families held what they called “Dancing Assemblies”, the forerunner of the Debutantes’ Ball that is still popular in the South. In the 1960s, it was the practice of many San Francisco Bay Area Filipino American community organizations like the Pearl of the Orient Club to sponsor annual Cotillion Balls where as many as two dozen Fil-Am debutantes were presented to the public during formal black tie balls. This past three-day weekend, my family and I flew from San Francisco to Boston to trek to the cold, snowing city of Natick, Massachusetts to celebrate Pauli’s debut. At the request of my sister, Loida, I served as the emcee and in my introductory remarks, I asked how many of the folks gathered there had ever been to a debut or had even heard of one. None of the non-Filipinos, who comprised the majority of the guests, raised their hands. Each of my sisters, in one way or another, celebrated their debuts in the Philippines when they turned 18 but I was unable to attend any of them because they occurred during the period of martial law in the Philippines. I was “exiled” in the US at the time and because of my anti-martial law activism found my way to the “Blacklist” of Ferdinand Marcos, subject to arrest upon setting foot in Manila. So Pauli’s debut would be my first ever. Because so many of Pauli’s guests had never heard of the Filipino Debut tradition, I presented them with a brief history, tracing not only its European origins but also its African essence. The heart of the Debut tradition is embodied in the ancient African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child." The basic meaning of this proverb from the Igbo and Yoruba regions of Nigeria is that raising a child is a communal effort, the responsibility for which lies not only with the parents but also with the extended family and the entire community.The debut offers the community an opportunity to formally come together to celebrate the achievements of the 18-year old girl and to wish the best of good fortune to the 18-year old woman as she embarks on the journey of her life. A highlight of any Debut is the cotillion waltz where nine couples dance a traditional waltz. What made Pauli’s debut somewhat unique was that the debutante personally choreographed her own Cotillion dance, enlisting 18 of her friends and cousins to commit to several weeks of arduous practice.After the Cotillion dance comes the traditional presentation of the 18 candles, (or 18 roses in some circles). In Pauli’s debut, friends, relatives and past teachers provided glimpses of her past similar to the popular 1950s TV show “This is your life” as they each lit a candle. Among the candle lighters were Pauli’s soccer and rugby coaches who each expressed their awe of Pauli’s physical prowess on the field while a wrestling coach spoke of her awesome executive abilities as the manager of his 18-man high school wrestling team. Other uncles and aunts shared vignettes of Pauli’s youth and of her guts to fly off to San Francisco by herself to spend several summers with her cousins and of her easy ability to forge friendships anywhere and everywhere. As her oldest uncle. I expressed my delight at having Pauli spend several summers with my family and allowing my three sons to experience the joy of having a sister around. I also shared some practical lessons I’ve learned in life that I thought Pauli could learn from: 1) Change the oil in your car regularly; it will save you a lot of money later on. 2) Lefty loosey, righty tighty. Turn to the left to loosen it and to the right to tighten it. 3) Never, but never, put any photo on Facebook or any message on Twitter that you don’t want the world to see, because, trust me, they will be seen eventually.After all 18 candles had been lit, Pauli called on her youngest cousins, Andrea and Ricky, to help her blow out all the candles. After that came the traditional cutting of the cake followed by the very untraditional dancing with her two fathers (Rambu until she was one and Jon for the next 17 years) while 18 years of photos of Pauli were projected on the screen. “Thank you all for making my Debut a truly special night,” Pauli said as the brief program concluded. Then the real bogeying party began. Many parents who can afford it offer their daughters the choice of either a car or a debut secretly hoping their daughters would pick the less expensive choice, a car. But in the course of one’s life, a girl will have many cars but only one opportunity to have a debut.Welcome to the rest of your life, Pauli.

The end of 2009 found Mt. Mayon, in the Southern Luzon province of Albay, on the verge of erupting as molten magma flowed half a mile down from its crater and dark plumes of ashes filled the sky causing the evacuation of more than 20,000 residents in and around the 8,070 ft. volcano. But the feared eruption never came and the villagers returned to their homes. Many feared that Mt. Mayon would go the way of Mt. Pinatubo which erupted on June 15, 1991 and which was considered the most powerful volcanic eruption in a century. As University of Chicago Prof. Stephen Levitt and New York Times Magazine editor Stephen Dubner describe it in their best-selling book on global cooling, Superfreakonomics, “within two hours of the main blast, sulfuric ash had reached 22 miles into the sky. By the time it was done, Pinatubo had discharged more than 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.”The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo devastated the Central Luzon provinces of Zambales and Pampanga causing the deaths of hundreds and the displacement of thousands of people. It also resulted in the decision by the US government to abandon its military bases in Olongapo (Subic Naval Base) and Angeles (Clark Air Force Base).While the eruption caused severe damage to the rice fields and other crops, it was not a total environmental disaster. “As it turned out,” according to Levitt and Dubner in their book which has already sold 4 million copies, “the stratospheric haze of sulfur dioxide acted like a layer of sunscreen, reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth. For the next two years, as the haze was settling out, the earth cooled out by an average of nearly one degree Fahrenheit, or .5 degrees Celsius. A single volcanic eruption practically reversed, albeit temporarily, the cumulative global warming of the previous hundred years.”Because of Mt. Pinatubo, Levitt and Dubner concluded that carbon dioxide is not poisonous and not the culprit in global warming. They are joined in this belief by Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myrvhold (former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft) who agreed with them that “all the heavy-particulate pollution generated seems to have cooled the atmosphere by dimming the sun.” In their book, they posed these questions: Do the future benefits from cutting emissions outweigh the costs of doing so? Or are we better off waiting to cut emissions later — or even, perhaps, polluting at will and just learning to live in a hotter world?

Their conclusion - found in the book’s most controversial chapter entitled “What do Al Gore and Mt. Pinatubo have in common?”- has been heavily criticized by scientists and economists including New York Times columnist and Nobel Laureat Paul Krugman and the Union of Concerned Scientists.The answer to the question above is that Al Gore and Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption both suggest a way to cool the planet, but with different cost-effective methods. The authors propose creating a “garden hose to the sky” to duplicate or replicate what Mt. Pinatubo achieved by funneling carbon dioxide directly into the stratosphere just as Mt. Pinatubo did.They believe this is a cheaper more cost-effective way than to cap carbon emissions as Al Gore and virtually all of the world’s leading scientists recommend. The authors do not dispute the reality of global warming. In an interview that was given after the book was released, Dubner clarified their position: “If global warming is a big enough problem to worry about, and we think it is, then the current proposed solutions (primarily carbon mitigation) will be too little and too late to solve the warming problem. That is a fundamentally different argument than what the carbon activists make. I don't blame them for attacking us: They have a lot at stake. What I'd like readers to walk away with is a better understanding of the scientific complexities of global warming as well as the economic realities — and, most of all, to understand how it would be a good idea to get a seat at the table for some other proposed solutions, including geo-engineering.”Prof. Joe Romm, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist questioned the authors’ enthusiastic embrace of geo-engineering and their dismissal of solar power as an effective tool to lower pollution. Romm criticized their contention that solar panels are ineffective “because they’re black” and thus generate heat that contributes to rising temperatures. In fact, as Romm points out, most solar panels are blue and the clean energy they generate greatly reduces the need to burn dirty coal or other hydrocarbons.

Their primary source for their belief that “carbon dioxide is not the villain” is Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology but Caldeira disputes the quote attributed to him. According to Caldeira, "carbon dioxide emissions represent a real threat to humans and natural systems, and I fear we may have already dawdled too long.”

The authors of Superfreakonomics endorse the proposal of Myrvhold to create the garden hose to the sky they call “Budyko's Blanket” to reverse global warming at a total cost of $250 million which they contend is much cheaper than the estimated $1.2 trillion that capping carbon emissions would cost.

In response to their proposal, Al Gore responded: "If we don't know enough to stop putting 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, how in God's name can we know enough to precisely counteract that?" The debates continue.

While the people around Mt. Mayon are anxiously waiting to see when, not if, the world’s most perfectly coned volcano will erupt and wreck havoc on their lives, there are people actually hoping that it will erupt just like Mt. Pinatubo did. Bust for the locals but a boon for the globals.

For the past several decades, it had been the practice of the San Francisco Philippine Consulate to celebrate Rizal Day on the occasion of his death anniversary on December 30 with a solemn program usually featuring the recitation of Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” (My Last Farewell) and speakers extolling the virtues of Philippine National Hero Dr. Jose Rizal. I was a speaker on a number of those forums because my mother was born in Calamba, Laguna, just a block from where Rizal was born, and I grew up frequently visiting Rizal’s home, now a museum, and voraciously reading everything I could find that was written by and about Rizal There was no such program at the Consulate this past December 30 because a new law moved the observance of Rizal Day from his death anniversary on December 30 to his birth anniversary on June 19. The observance of Rizal Day on December 30 traced its historical roots to a decree issued on December 20, 1898 by President Emilio Aguinaldo and affirmed by the Philippine Commission on February 1, 1902.When Rizal Day was observed on December 30, students were on their Christmas break and there were no school programs to honor Dr. Jose Rizal. As National Historical Institute chair Ambeth Ocampo noted, “if Rizal Day is observed on June 19, classes have just started and students would be able to actively participate in the commemorative activities.”Even though Rizal Day has been observed since 1898, there was no systemic effort made by the government to include the writings of Dr. Rizal in the curriculum of the schools. In his novel, Noli Mi Tangere (“Touch Me Not”), Dr. Rizal sought to remove the veil of ignorance and superstition that had kept his countrymen subservient to the Catholic Church and to the Spanish colonial government. While Dr. Rizal was honored on Rizal Day, his writings were not disseminated because of pressure from the Catholic Church to prevent his “anti-friar” novels from being widely read. This pressure from the Church continued long after the Spaniards were expelled from the Philippines in 1898 and lasted close to 60 years after Dr. Rizal’s execution by the Spaniards for his writings. This veil was only removed in 1956 after Sen. Jose B. Laurel, Sr. and Sen. Claro M. Recto sponsored Senate Bill 438 requiring the teaching in all schools about the life of Dr.Rizal. The bill also required that Rizal’s two novels, “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo” (the Subversive), in its “unexpurgated” form, be made compulsory reading.

The Rizal Bill was strongly opposed by three senators who were known as stout defenders of the Church- Decoroso Rosales, Mariano Cuenco and Francisco “Soc” Rodrigo. (Sen. Rodrigo’s nickname did not come as short for Socrates, as many thought, but actually stood for “Soldier of Christ”, which he considered himself to be). Together, they denounced Rizal as “anti-Catholic” and charged that his writings were replete with “errors of church dogma”. They said that Filipino students were “immature” and unprepared to understand Rizal’s writings.Manila Mayor Arsenio Lacson supported the bill and famously walked out of a mass when, during the homily, the priest read a circular from the archbishop denouncing the Rizal Bill.

On April 22, 1956, a week after the Rizal Bill was introduced, the Sunday newspapers all carried a statement from the Catholic bishops describing Rizal’s works as violating Catholic canon law on heresy and schism. Joining in opposition to the bill were the Catholic Action of the Philippines, the Holy Name Society of the Philippines, the Legion of Mary, the Knights of Columbus and the Daughters of Isabela.

When representatives of Catholic schools threatened to close down their schools if the Rizal bill was enacted into law, Sen. Recto responded that he would push for the nationalization of Catholic schools if they closed down.

All kinds of compromises were proposed including one that would put Rizal’s novels under lock and key in the school libraries, an amendment which was rejected. One amendment that was approved allowed students to apply for an “exemption” for religious reasons from reading the Noli/Fili novels.

Barely a month after it was introduced, the bill was passed by both the House and the Senate on May 17, 1956. On June 12, President Ramon Magsaysay signed the bill into law as Republic Act 1425.

More than 50 years after the enactment of the “Rizal law,” Ambeth Ocampo noted that not one student applied for an exemption from reading “Noli” and Fili”.

Although the Catholic Church lost the Rizal Bill battle in 1956, it has won all other legislative battles since then. It has succeeded in preventing the passage of bills that would legalize divorce in the Philippines keeping the Philippines as one of only three countries in the world that does not allow for divorce (the others are Malta and the Vatican City) and one (the RH bill) that would provide for reproductive health education and support which would prevent more than 500,000 abortions a year resulting from unwanted pregnancies.

But the RH bill, supported by presidential candidate Noynoy Aquino, may yet follow the example of the Rizal Bill and pass if Aquino is elected president in the May 2010 elections.